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Microsoft showed off a new operating system on Tuesday, but don't get too excited.Think of Singularity as "a concept-car OS," said Rick Rashid, general director of Microsoft Research. Microsoft is making the prototype OS available free to the academic and research communities in the hope that they'll use it to develop new kinds of computer architectures.
It's difficult for the academic community to experiment with computer architectures, he said. Singularity is designed to make it easier for researchers to test how operating systems and applications interact with each other, he said."It's a new system built from the ground up, with the specific goal of being more reliable," Rashid said. Microsoft hopes that Singularity will help improve software reliability and boost research in programming languages and tools.Singularity is available on Microsoft's CodePlex Web site. It was unveiled on Tuesday at TechFest, Microsoft's annual showcase of projects from its research division.Rashid also showed off BEE3, a hardware project that Microsoft designed with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley to let researchers experiment with computer architectures. "The idea behind it is to build a computer system that is configurable," Rashid said. "You can program this computer to be another computer or do another kind of architecture or experiment with new kinds of algorithms," he said.Rashid and his colleagues are demonstrating technologies that Microsoft's research group is working on. Some of the projects ultimately contribute to Microsoft products but others, like vaccine design and quantum computing, often seem irrelevant to the software giant's core business.Still, Rashid said that the best return on any investment that Microsoft makes consistently comes from its investment in Microsoft Research. The group generates about a quarter of the company's patents, he said. Apple Wednesday issued another massive update for Mac OS X that you'll want to get if you're a Mac user. It also updated the latest beta of Safari running on Windows. It issued similar updates in late July.
The Mac update, which is available for both client and server versions of OS X 10.3.9 and OS X 10.4 through 10.4.10, fixes a total of 41 security bugs ? more than 40 percent of which I'd label "critical." The current update is numbered 2007-008.The portions of the system that are patched are all over the map ? ranging from a hole in the Flash Player plug-in that could lead to complete takeover of your Mac, to one in the Safari browser that could have the same result. There are also holes in the kernel as well as in networking code.As I've said before, when the potential outcomes section of a vendor's security alert says "may result in arbitrary code execution," that's code language for "complete takeover." Those are the ones that I always personally label as "critical." I count 17 of the 41 fixes that include that description.And even if they're not critical, the results of a successful exploit can still be unpleasant, including theft of personal information from onscreen forms, or even something that's seemingly minor, if annoying and a little scary, like causing a system crash for no apparent reason.
You can get more info and a link to the OS X patched update at Apple's security update page. You can get the update automatically or manually download it.Meanwhile, Apple isn't neglecting other platforms either. It's put out a Safari 3 beta update that fixes several holes, at least three of them critical, in the beta of version 3 of the browser running on Windows XP and Vista. The patched version is numbered 3.0.4.
It's difficult for the academic community to experiment with computer architectures, he said. Singularity is designed to make it easier for researchers to test how operating systems and applications interact with each other, he said."It's a new system built from the ground up, with the specific goal of being more reliable," Rashid said. Microsoft hopes that Singularity will help improve software reliability and boost research in programming languages and tools.Singularity is available on Microsoft's CodePlex Web site. It was unveiled on Tuesday at TechFest, Microsoft's annual showcase of projects from its research division.Rashid also showed off BEE3, a hardware project that Microsoft designed with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley to let researchers experiment with computer architectures. "The idea behind it is to build a computer system that is configurable," Rashid said. "You can program this computer to be another computer or do another kind of architecture or experiment with new kinds of algorithms," he said.Rashid and his colleagues are demonstrating technologies that Microsoft's research group is working on. Some of the projects ultimately contribute to Microsoft products but others, like vaccine design and quantum computing, often seem irrelevant to the software giant's core business.Still, Rashid said that the best return on any investment that Microsoft makes consistently comes from its investment in Microsoft Research. The group generates about a quarter of the company's patents, he said. Apple Wednesday issued another massive update for Mac OS X that you'll want to get if you're a Mac user. It also updated the latest beta of Safari running on Windows. It issued similar updates in late July.
The Mac update, which is available for both client and server versions of OS X 10.3.9 and OS X 10.4 through 10.4.10, fixes a total of 41 security bugs ? more than 40 percent of which I'd label "critical." The current update is numbered 2007-008.The portions of the system that are patched are all over the map ? ranging from a hole in the Flash Player plug-in that could lead to complete takeover of your Mac, to one in the Safari browser that could have the same result. There are also holes in the kernel as well as in networking code.As I've said before, when the potential outcomes section of a vendor's security alert says "may result in arbitrary code execution," that's code language for "complete takeover." Those are the ones that I always personally label as "critical." I count 17 of the 41 fixes that include that description.And even if they're not critical, the results of a successful exploit can still be unpleasant, including theft of personal information from onscreen forms, or even something that's seemingly minor, if annoying and a little scary, like causing a system crash for no apparent reason.
You can get more info and a link to the OS X patched update at Apple's security update page. You can get the update automatically or manually download it.Meanwhile, Apple isn't neglecting other platforms either. It's put out a Safari 3 beta update that fixes several holes, at least three of them critical, in the beta of version 3 of the browser running on Windows XP and Vista. The patched version is numbered 3.0.4.
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